arXiv subjects

Mo Zou

Publications and source records attributed to Mo Zou.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

OSFoundry: Building and Evolving Operating Systems with Specification-Guided Agents

Operating systems must evolve continuously. Yet their development remains code-centric and largely manual: even a localized change can require recovering implicit assumptions, coordinating multiple subsystems, and repeatedly building, booting, testing, and debugging the complete system. General-purpose coding agents automate individual edits, but their prompt-centric workflows repeatedly reconstruct task boundaries and OS semantics from scattered context, limiting their reliability for sustained OS evolution. This paper presents OSFoundry, an OS-specialized agent harness that makes design intent persistent throughout OS development. Its key insight is to separate stable intent from diverse implementation. Instead of relying on free-form natural-language prompts to convey design intent, OSFoundry uses SysSpec*, a shared development blueprint comprising a task-bounding Plan and an OS-specific Specification: the Plan bounds what a change should achieve, while the Specification records the interfaces, modular dependencies, and concurrency semantics that its implementation must preserve. Agents implement and validate code against this same blueprint, refining both SysSpec* and the implementation when execution or review exposes a mismatch. We evaluate OSFoundry along three ways. First, OSFoundry generates SpecOS from SysSpec*; the resulting complete OS boots and passes all 70 functional tests. Second, specification patches evolve SpecOS with a GUI and three performance optimizations that improve performance by up to 4.41x. Third, across 11 recent Linux-kernel bug-fix tasks, OSFoundry achieves 1.8x the accuracy of Codex using GPT-5.5. These results show that persistent specifications can shift OS construction and evolution from repeated manual kernel engineering toward specification-guided development.

cs.OS↗

arXiv2026

Sharpen the Spec, Cut the Code: A Case for Generative File System with SYSSPEC

File systems are critical OS components that require constant evolution to support new hardware and emerging application needs. However, the traditional paradigm of developing features, fixing bugs, and maintaining the system incurs significant overhead, especially as systems grow in complexity. This paper proposes a new paradigm, generative file systems, which leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate and evolve a file system from prompts, effectively addressing the need for robust evolution. Despite the widespread success of LLMs in code generation, attempts to create a functional file system have thus far been unsuccessful, mainly due to the ambiguity of natural language prompts. This paper introduces SYSSPEC, a framework for developing generative file systems. Its key insight is to replace ambiguous natural language with principles adapted from formal methods. Instead of imprecise prompts, SYSSPEC employs a multi-part specification that accurately describes a file system's functionality, modularity, and concurrency. The specification acts as an unambiguous blueprint, guiding LLMs to generate expected code flexibly. To manage evolution, we develop a DAG-structured patch that operates on the specification itself, enabling new features to be added without violating existing invariants. Moreover, the SYSSPEC toolchain features a set of LLM-based agents with mechanisms to mitigate hallucination during construction and evolution. We demonstrate our approach by generating SPECFS, a concurrent file system. SPECFS demonstrates equivalent level of correctness to that of a manually-coded baseline across hundreds of regression tests. We further confirm its evolvability by seamlessly integrating 10 real-world features from Ext4. Our work shows that a specification-guided approach makes generating and evolving complex systems not only feasible but also highly effective.

cs.OS↗

arXiv2026

Hardwired-Neurons Language Processing Units as General-Purpose Cognitive Substrates

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has established language as a core general-purpose cognitive substrate, driving the demand for specialized Language Processing Units (LPUs) tailored for LLM inference. To overcome the growing energy consumption of LLM inference systems, this paper proposes a Hardwired-Neurons Language Processing Unit (HNLPU), which physically hardwires LLM weight parameters into the computational fabric, achieving several orders of magnitude computational efficiency improvement by extreme specialization. However, a significant challenge still lies in the scale of modern LLMs. A straightforward hardwiring of gpt-oss 120 B would require fabricating photomask sets valued at over 6 billion dollars, rendering this straightforward solution economically impractical. Addressing this challenge, we propose the novel Metal-Embedding methodology. Instead of embedding weights in a 2D grid of silicon device cells, Metal-Embedding embeds weight parameters into the 3D topology of metal wires. This brings two benefits: (1) a 15x increase in density, and (2) 60 out of 70 photomask layers are homogeneous across chips, including all EUV photomasks. In total, Metal-Embedding reduced the photomask cost by 112x, bringing the Non-Recurring Engineering (NRE) cost of HNLPU into an economically viable range. Experimental results show that HNLPU achieved 249,960 tokens/s (5,555x/85x that of GPU/WSE), 36 tokens/J (1,047x/283x that of GPU/WSE), 13,232 mm2 total die area, $59.46 M-123.5 M estimated NRE at 5 nm technology. Analysis shows that HNLPU achieved 41.7-80.4x improvement in cost-effectiveness and 357x reduction in carbon footprint compared to OpenAI-scale H100 clusters, under an annual weight updating assumption.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2024

HiHGNN: Accelerating HGNNs through Parallelism and Data Reusability Exploitation

Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) have emerged as powerful algorithms for processing heterogeneous graphs (HetGs), widely used in many critical fields. To capture both structural and semantic information in HetGs, HGNNs first aggregate the neighboring feature vectors for each vertex in each semantic graph and then fuse the aggregated results across all semantic graphs for each vertex. Unfortunately, existing graph neural network accelerators are ill-suited to accelerate HGNNs. This is because they fail to efficiently tackle the specific execution patterns and exploit the high-degree parallelism as well as data reusability inside and across the processing of semantic graphs in HGNNs. In this work, we first quantitatively characterize a set of representative HGNN models on GPU to disclose the execution bound of each stage, inter-semantic-graph parallelism, and inter-semantic-graph data reusability in HGNNs. Guided by our findings, we propose a high-performance HGNN accelerator, HiHGNN, to alleviate the execution bound and exploit the newfound parallelism and data reusability in HGNNs. Specifically, we first propose a bound-aware stage-fusion methodology that tailors to HGNN acceleration, to fuse and pipeline the execution stages being aware of their execution bounds. Second, we design an independency-aware parallel execution design to exploit the inter-semantic-graph parallelism. Finally, we present a similarity-aware execution scheduling to exploit the inter-semantic-graph data reusability. Compared to the state-of-the-art software framework running on NVIDIA GPU T4 and GPU A100, HiHGNN respectively achieves an average 41.5$\times$ and 8.6$\times$ speedup as well as 106$\times$ and 73$\times$ energy efficiency with quarter the memory bandwidth of GPU A100.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2022

Characterizing and Understanding HGNNs on GPUs

Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) deliver powerful capacity in heterogeneous graph representation learning. The execution of HGNNs is usually accelerated by GPUs. Therefore, characterizing and understanding the execution pattern of HGNNs on GPUs is important for both software and hardware optimizations. Unfortunately, there is no detailed characterization effort of HGNN workloads on GPUs. In this paper, we characterize HGNN workloads at inference phase and explore the execution of HGNNs on GPU, to disclose the execution semantic and execution pattern of HGNNs. Given the characterization and exploration, we propose several useful guidelines for both software and hardware optimizations for the efficient execution of HGNNs on GPUs.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2022

Characterizing and Understanding Distributed GNN Training on GPUs

Graph neural network (GNN) has been demonstrated to be a powerful model in many domains for its effectiveness in learning over graphs. To scale GNN training for large graphs, a widely adopted approach is distributed training which accelerates training using multiple computing nodes. Maximizing the performance is essential, but the execution of distributed GNN training remains preliminarily understood. In this work, we provide an in-depth analysis of distributed GNN training on GPUs, revealing several significant observations and providing useful guidelines for both software optimization and hardware optimization.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2022

Alleviating Datapath Conflicts and Design Centralization in Graph Analytics Acceleration

Previous graph analytics accelerators have achieved great improvement on throughput by alleviating irregular off-chip memory accesses. However, on-chip side datapath conflicts and design centralization have become the critical issues hindering further throughput improvement. In this paper, a general solution, Multiple-stage Decentralized Propagation network (MDP-network), is proposed to address these issues, inspired by the key idea of trading latency for throughput. Besides, a novel High throughput Graph analytics accelerator, HiGraph, is proposed by deploying MDP-network to address each issue in practice. The experiment shows that compared with state-of-the-art accelerator, HiGraph achieves up to 2.2x speedup (1.5x on average) as well as better scalability.

cs.AR↗